Ignoring the No Trespassing signs, Stuart Dybek parks at the end of an unnamed gravel road near I-55 and Western, then pushes through weeds and brush to the rocky bank that slopes north toward the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. It’s a bright blue August afternoon, and soon he’s standing in the shadow of what he calls the “jackknife bridge”–the historic “Eight Track” railroad bridge. That bridge has made cameo appearances in many of Dybek’s stories and poems, most which are based on his experiences growing up as a second-generation Polish-American in Pilsen and Little Village in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s.
Later Dybek cruises up California past the Cook County Jail, a few blocks from where he grew up. “There’s this theme in everything I write about urban nature–this [greenway] we’re passing once seemed to me like a vast overgrown veldt,” he says. “So you have this juxtaposition between the jail on one side and the area where I felt the most free–on the way to the railroad tracks and the river.”
In The Coast of Chicago longer stories alternate with “short shorts”–compressed fictions rarely longer than a page or two. All the stories are linked by a strong sense of place, by themes concerning memory and imagination, and by an elegiac tone. The New York Times said its best stories “introduce us to characters who want to take up permanent residence in our minds,” while others “read like self-conscious creative-writing class exercises.” Other critics place the book in the same category as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Isaac Babel’s Tales of Odessa, and even James Joyce’s The Dubliners.
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If you’d asked him anytime since the mid-90s when his next book was coming out, Dybek would say he was working on several projects and that a book would be published soon. He says something would have been out a lot sooner if the book he’d originally set out to write hadn’t “split in half on me. As I approached the end of it I could see that the stories weren’t cohabiting comfortably in the same book, and that in fact I was writing two books. The book I had imagined writing wasn’t working. At that point, I saw that one of them could be [I Sailed With Magellan]. The book that I was working on was a much more fabulous book, more like The Coast of Chicago. I’ve got this second part of it now to finish. I’m well along.”
He adds, “Chicago literature is also about divisions–divisions between groups, divisions between individuals.” But in Dybek’s stories “there’s the possibility of people overcoming those divisions with art, connecting beyond the false dichotomies of race, class, gender, geography, neighborhood, and ethnicity.”
Dybek rarely ventured into his old haunts when he came back. But having finished I Sailed With Magellan, he decided he didn’t have to stay away anymore.
“A lot of the things in the stories people think I make up I don’t make up,” Dybek says. “It might seem that it’s different in the stories because they’re so heavy on mood–so you’re picking up on that moodiness, and it doesn’t seem as plain as this.”
